It is known to provide water softening appliances which are coupled to such a brine device with a control unit, a control valve, which makes sure that water is periodically supplied to the reservoir and which also makes sure that, after this water has been turned into brine, due to the contact with the salt, this brine is drawn in from the salt tank so as to regenerate the above-mentioned active medium.
In conventional brine devices, the reservoir is practically entirely emptied with each regeneration, so that it often takes more than one hour before the water which is supplied to the reservoir at the end of the regeneration cycle has formed a saturated brine with the salt. Such brine devices are described among others in BE 578.211, U.S. Pat. No. 3,570,520 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,844,305. Hence, with such a brine device it is not possible to carry out successive regenerations.
In order to advance the transformation of water into saturated brine, it is already known to make the water circulate in the brine vessel by means of a circulation pump, for example as described in NL 7114100. Although the transformation process is advanced by this, it still takes a relatively long time to produce the brine.
Finally, another brine device is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,336,134 with a float-controlled valve, whereby the float cooperates with the valve via magnetically coupled parts The device described in this document is disadvantageous in that the construction is quite complex due to the use of the above-mentioned magnetic coupling and as a consequence is not very reliable. Moreover, this brine device does not allow for an easy setting of the brine reserves.